Poem/London Burns

The dreadful ease with which a fire starts,

that match-head flick and short, sharp scratch

that brings the sparks like shrapnel shards

and sets the world ablaze.

  .

We choke on smoke, the London sky a failing lung

consumptive with the greed and deeds

of men who run, and men with guns,

and humankind who, hungry, hunt,

and wanting, wreak

 .

but do not speak

a language easy on the tongue.

 .

When rhyme and reason mount the curb

and see their foes, and will not swerve,

and better men who stood to save the things they loved

are knocked instead to early graves

we ask ourselves where parents were –

what bridles checked might otherwise

have reined the rage and spared their lives –

 .

when everything is going up in flames.

 .

Elsewhere, a po-faced banker knots his tie

and strangles like a Tyburn son

in auto-erotic ecstasy; but then he kicks the chair away

and jerks and spasms in the throes

of sex and death and – look, who fucking knows?

But that’s the joy of double-dipping, chaps:

the money breaks, and and then its spenders snap.

 .

And everyone is asking why,

as though some word or magic curse

could tell them how to steer away from worse.

But in the rubble, born and grown by greed

that burns both ways, and fear, and hurt, and need

Dame Trickledown is turning deadly tricks

for stolen gold

 .

and newly-bloodied bricks.

Provoked by this news article.

England Thus Far

I’ve been in England now for just over four days, and am having an absolute blast. Getting off the plane at Heathrow, there’s a weird period of dissonance wherein it’s difficult to grok that you’re in another country, owing to the universal dictum that All Airports Look The Same. Also, there’s a not inconsiderable portion of my brain which expects, for whatever reason, that the sky in England should be a different colour, perhaps because this would be the most demonstrable means of telling that I was no longer in Kansas. (Well, Melbourne. You get the idea.) The point being, it takes a while to sink in. There’s a lot of green, a lot of blue, and then suddenly you’re walking down the road to the shops and there’s a deer, an actual honest-to-God deer staring at you from the foilage, blinking doeishly before bounding off into the trees, and you’re picking blackberries on the bridleway to eat for breakfast, and then it hits you that you are very emphatically not in Australia, and that this is a Wonderful Thing.

We’ve had a preliminary scratch at the surface of London, by which I mean we’ve done the obvious touristy things like gawking at Big Ben and watching the changing of the guard and strolling through Harrods and raiding the bookshops on Charring Cross Road in anticipation of later, more in-depth excursions (yay!), but have not yet found Londinium, something which I am very eager to do. We have slight colds, which is annoying but probably to be expected given 24 hours in a plane after weeks of exhausted running about, but are otherwise well.

And now, I shall drink some more pineapple juice and read my book. In England!